Racing
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Lewis Hamilton passed Max Verstappen on Lap 62 at Turn 1 and held him off to finish second in the Canadian Grand Prix, delivering his best grand prix result yet for Ferrari in a race that turned on a long, technical fight between the two former title rivals.
The result came the hard way. Verstappen had taken third from Hamilton on Lap 9 with a move down the inside at Turn 1, and from there Hamilton spent the final stint trying to pull Red Bull back in. He eventually made the decisive move around the outside of Turn 1, then absorbed Verstappen’s pressure through the final laps to secure second in Montreal.
Hamilton said the battle was defined by the difference between the cars. Ferrari was stronger through the corners, he said, but Red Bull had the edge on the straights, which meant every attack had to be built carefully. “Absolutely awesome to fight with one of the greats,” Hamilton said after the race in Montreal. He called it “massively challenging” because “they still have more power in the straights,” forcing him to calculate where to deploy energy and “maximise the amount of power on my battery bar each straight.”
That made the chase as much a technical exercise as a wheel-to-wheel one. Hamilton said he lost time early in the race when Verstappen was quicker at the start, but felt Ferrari came alive once he switched to the medium tire. From that point, he said, he was able to hunt Verstappen down, even if getting close was not enough on its own because the straight-line deficit kept undoing what he gained in the corners.
He also felt Ferrari had no answer for the pace of Mercedes at the front. Speaking to Sky Sport, Hamilton said, “We could never have caught the Mercedes today, they were too fast.” He added that the fight for second became harder after a lock-up sent him straight on, costing him ground and forcing him to close the gap again before he could attack Verstappen.
Verstappen came away from the duel with third but agreed on the quality of the fight. “It was very good. I enjoyed it a lot,” he said, describing the final laps as flat out. In the cooldown room, the pair compared where each car had been strongest, with Verstappen telling Hamilton: “The middle chicanes, every time you’d pull three tenths, but then I just got it back on the straight.”
That exchange matched Hamilton’s own explanation of the race and underlined why Ferrari will take more from Montreal than a podium alone. Speaking to Canal+ France, Hamilton said that if Ferrari could produce this kind of result on a track where power is so important, then the team may be even more competitive at circuits where power matters less. For a team still trying to climb back to the front, second place behind a faster Mercedes looked less like an isolated result than a sign that Ferrari’s progress may finally be starting to show.